□１ Posession, Property, Ownership
As the title says, this is a book about "property," but at the same time, as discussed in the second item below, it is also a book about "ableism."
The English words "possession," "property," and "ownership" can all be translated using the Japanese word "shoyū." I wrote this book without thinking about the differences between these terms in English. Take, for example, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Macpherson [1962=1980]. Here and throughout the text, the year after the "=" following a citation indicates the year of publication of the Japanese translation), a book I read when I was eighteen years old and first becoming interested in this topic, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality(Cohen[1995=2005]), published many years later, and Property(Ryan[1987=1993]) - "shoyū" was used in the title of all of these books when they were published in Japanese. I was not sure which term I should choose when it came to the English title of my own book. Chapters 1 and 2 mainly involve the presentation and criticism of a position taken by various thinkers beginning with John Locke. This view, boiled down to its simplest formulation, is "what I make is mine (something over which I should have control)," and in these chapters the terms "ownership" and "self-ownership" are frequently employed.
In Chapter 4, on the other hand, I discuss what is attributed or not attributed to each person as something proper to them or inherently theirs. Here, and this will surely seem quite strange to those familiar with the existing discourse on this topic, I develop the assertion that what is not proper to the person in question should be distributed among all individuals ? they should be given ownership of it - as the target of actions such as exchange. The term "property" is therefore used more often here.
My ability in English is limited to reading, and this book was therefore translated by someone else (Robert Chapeskie). There were a few places in which I made changes to the terms used, but for the most part these wordings were chosen by the translator.

□2 Ableism, Meritocracy
To repeat what was said above, the main topic addressed by this book is nōryoku-shugi. "Nōryoku" corresponds to the English word "ability," while "-shugi" is roughly equivalent to the English suffix "-ism." In Japan this term is mostly used with a positive meaning under the same paradigm in which "achievement" is affirmed in contrast with "ascription," but since the end of the 1960s it has in some cases also been used as a term with a critical or pejorative nuance. I basically agree with this stance, and in this book have attempted to show the logical validity of this criticism.
"Meritocracy" is an English word that roughly corresponds to "nōryoku-shugi." Even in English this is a relatively new term, and is currently used to refer to one type of social system or organization. To my way of thinking, however, nōryoku-shugi is not only a kind of social system but also a belief or value, and this belief or value is something that has constantly existed at the very bottom of modern society. I have asked the translator to use the term "ableism" for nōryoku-shugi throughout this text.
I am aware that the word "ableism" refers to segregationism or discrimination against "people with a disability" in a narrow sense, and is a relatively recent term that is not widely used. With this understanding in mind, in this book I use this term to refer to an enormous reality/concept that pervades this society; the main aim of this book is to fundamentally criticize, at least on a theoretical basis, this gargantuan reality/concept, and to demonstrate the existence of other approaches/values. For texts in which I consider actual societies/systems more concretely, please see Tateiwa[2000c], [2004a], [2006], Tateiwa, Murakami and Hashiguchi[2009], Tateiwa and Saito[2010], and Tateiwa and Hotta[2012].